2014 Volvo Drive-E engines

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Volvo flies free with new Drive-E engines, new architecture and a new vision

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The vanilla days are over

Volvo cars have always been safe, innovative and socially conscious but, since the glory days of the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, possibly a little boring. We all pay lip service to solidity, reliability and safety, but when it comes to cars, we want to break out and grab some excitement too. Volvo has embarked on a programme to bring you just that. To quote the company’s design director Thomas Ingenlath: “The vanilla days are over.”

Left: Volvo T6 Drive-E engine

Shackled by production complications caused by juggling three different architectures and eight different engines, some of which were inherited, it became difficult to build cars economically. Imagine, for example, the nightmare of procuring and stock-controlling the hundreds of different pipes, tubes, brackets and wiring looms needed to adapt eight engines into three different floor plans. For once engineers, accountants and production people agreed: This is madness.

Apart from ongoing introduction of new safety and convenience technologies, the primary goals were obviously to rationalise engines and architecture and to update the look, feel and performance of Volvo cars to make them more exciting.

Enter Volvo’s soon-to-be-introduced scalable architecture that can be stretched or shrunk: Longer, wider, taller or simply smaller, to accommodate anything from a small hatchback to a seven-seat SUV. But for the makers of tubes, pipes and wiring looms and for the assembly staff, brackets and fittings will remain constant because there will be only two, essentially identical, engines producing differing quantities of power. The accountants will be happy. So will designers and engineers, because money saved on incidentals can be ploughed back into R & D.

Volvo goes as far as to call big V8 engines ‘dinosaurs’ because by simply adding electric motor assistance the company will be able to offer power and torque outputs equivalent to those of heavyweight Detroit, British or German iron. The new scalable architecture is ready to accept electric motors. And batteries will be accommodated within the platform rather than by stealing space from under the boot floor as most current hybrids do.

That’s in the almost-immediate future. What we can talk about right now is the new Drive-E engines or, put differently, two versions of one engine. Petrol and diesel derivatives share the same four-cylinder, 16-valve, DOHC configuration, 1969 cc displacement, engine management system and 25-percent of their parts. A further 50-percent of components are very similar, while just 25-percent are uniquely petrol or diesel. With four different power outputs for each, the company will once again effectively offer eight different engines. To keep nomenclature simple, D always means diesel, T always means turbo (petrol) and higher numbers denote more power.

“These engines are completely new. Neither is a reworked legacy engine. Both are proudly Volvo; developed in Göteborg and built in Skövde, 150 kilometres to the north-east. No Geely input here. We are grateful for the parent company’s support but this is an all-Volvo initiative,” says Malin Labecker, manager of the engine development team on this project. She continued: “Volvo cars will eventually be built in China, but only for the Chinese market where expectations and standards differ from what is demanded in Europe and the rest of the world.”

Apart from being new and sharing parts, the engines were designed from scratch to be cleaner and more economical, meeting or surpassing Euro6 emissions standards up to 2017. Economy is improved by between 15- and 35-percent over the older versions; with CO2 emissions as low as 107 gm/km for the 133 kW D4 diesel and 137 gm/km for the 180 kW T5 petrol, depending on application.

A “twin charged” T6 version, expected later this year, will develop 225 kW and boast a CO2 figure of 157 grams per kilometre. Fitted to a FWD V60, it will do zero to 100 km/h in six seconds flat. One or two German two-litre engines get close but don’t match these emissions figures. “That’s ‘yet’, obviously,” smiled Labecker. “We have to be realistic because everybody is working hard all the time.”

Part of the process lies in reduction of friction wherever possible, with camshafts running in ball bearings for example. Precise location of vital parts, using fool-proof key and groove mountings, means that pistons will always be exactly at top dead centre when they should be and no camshaft should ever again slip through production with its gears one tooth out of alignment.

Each diesel fuel injector has a small computer on top of it to monitor injection pressure. Using this information, the self-adapting system, called i-Art, makes sure that the ideal amount of fuel is injected during each combustion cycle. Together with an injection pressure of 2500 bar, i-Art technology provides improved fuel economy, lower emissions, high performance and a powerful sound. Other refinements include state-of-the-art twin-turbo setups and a smart valve solution on the cooling system for quicker warm-up after cold starts.

We had brief drives in current 60-series cars, fitted with D4 and T5 engines, on suggested routes around White River in Mpumalanga. Both derivatives performed very well although the diesel felt a little reluctant to kick down and overtake while in Eco mode with the autobox in Drive.

Switching this configuration off, or selecting manual override, improved things a lot. The T5 petrol motor with its added 47 kW and almost as much torque as the diesel was decently athletic, surprising us when flooring the pedal experimentally at 115 km/h. The needle spun around to 135 in what felt like only a millisecond.

What can I buy right now, you ask? S60, V60 and XC60 models with D4 and T5 engines are available immediately. The same models with T6 will arrive late this year (2014). The V40 T5 should be here in July and the V40 D4 is expected toward the end of the year. The rest of the Volvo range will follow between then and 2016.

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This is a one-man show, which means that every car reviewed is given my personal evaluation and receives my own seat of the pants judgement - no second hand input here.Every test car goes through real world driving; on city streets littered with potholes, speed bumps and rumble strips, on freeways and if its profile demands, dirt roads as well.

I do my best to include relevant information like real life fuel economy or a close mathematical calculation, boot size or luggage space, whether the space is both usable and accessible, whether life-sized people can use the back seat (where that applies), basic specs of the vehicle and performance figures if they are published. In the case of clearly identified launch reports, fuel figures are of necessity the laboratory numbers provided with the release material. If I ever place an article that doesn't cover most things, it's probably because I have dealt with that vehicle at least once already, so you will be able to find what you want in another report under the same manufacturer's heading in the menu on the left.

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